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Yeah, even “full manual”, the focus is still ‘fly-by-wire’ and the iris, too. The only thing fully mechanical is the zoom. Again, these cameras were designed to just hand someone that doesn’t fully know what they’re doing and still be able to get acceptable(in the tv news sense) results.

Yes, if you hand me that camera I can get better results out of it than someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing, but those results are not going to be as good as what I can get out of my big-boy cameras, more easily and with less effort.

Would I buy one as a primary camera? No. But if it was only $1500 instead of $3500, it might be worth having one stuck under the back seat just in-case, if my ENG camera went down on an ENG shoot. And if I was a news-dog. Those types of cameras were very popular for that 10-15 years ago with a lot of the network guys as emergency back-ups and b/c cameras for 2/3”.

Really surprised lens can't go full manual. Am I imagining that EX1 can do it? I haven't used EX1 for many years now. I think last time was 2011 or something. But I remember it could. Maybe I'm wrong. But yes for $1500 it would be worth as a b cam. But they are already selling used for about $2500 so maybe in 1 or 2 years they will be $1500.

If that's the camera I'm thinking of, I believe it was actually a special/purpose built Fuji lens that worked in either a fly-by-wire system or Canon L style lens that is mechanical, but has a clutch/slip system that lets the ring spin with no hard-stops so that the AF system can take over at anytime(or you manually take over at any time from AF) AND then you could pull or push the focus ring forward or backwards(never used it so don't remember which) and it locked the ring/focus system into a fully manual system with hard stops. That's how I understood it to work anyway.